The door was exactly as he remembered it, the same iron surface, same faint discoloration along the edges where the runes had been inscribed and then deliberately worn down. Everything in front of him matched. The layout, the smell of the damp stones, the slight downward tilt in the floor before the threshold. He knew this place a little too well, more than he would have preferred as a matter of fact.
The blood-curdling weight he had felt pressing against him deeper in the tunnels was gone. It had lifted somewhere between the last turn and now, and the absence of it loosened something in his chest that he hadn't realized was coiled tight. He stood for a moment and breathed it out, telling himself it had been nothing. Paranoia, his senses running ahead of reality the way they sometimes did in unfamiliar territory.
